Red Sox start roller-coaster ride right

Monday's home opener had all the usual trappings, from the brilliant sunshine to stilt-walking Big League Brian to the usual postgame gutters full of 'K' cards.

Jon Couture

BOSTON — On Saturday, the Red Sox mustered two hits and lost to a guy on his third franchise in four years. On Sunday, they slugged six home runs and decimated the reigning NL Cy Young winner. On Monday, they and the Orioles couldn't get a runner to third base until the bottom of the seventh.

On Saturday, John Lackey's biceps were the depressing story. On Sunday, Will Middlebrooks was flexing his in the dugout with a smile. He was hitless on Monday, but climbed the dugout steps to greet Daniel Nava, whose mortar onto Lansdowne Street made it nine straight victorious home openers.

"He's done a much better job of picking out some pitches and getting a pitch to drive," said manager John Farrell of Nava after the 3-1 victory.

"He's done a heck of a job at the plate."

Welcome to the schizophrenic 2013 Red Sox season, where anything's possible and, for what still feels a rare moment, it feels so good. (So good. So good.)

Monday's home opener had all the usual trappings, from the brilliant sunshine to stilt-walking Big League Brian — "Bigger and Better," he touts of 2013 — to the usual postgame gutters full of 'K' cards. I'll spare you the treacle about winter's thaw and a time for renewal ... you should know it by heart by now.

New looks? Well, there was Jose Iglesias, the guy with the hot bat we just can't demote. Jackie Bradley Jr. got a big ovation, on account of being the guy with the hot bat we just couldn't demote two weeks ago. (At 3-for-21 after a day spent watching Nava in left, those 20 minor-league days suddenly feel no big deal.)

And there, out on the wall in left-center, a new message below some hanging Sox: "WELCOME BACK FANS." Just in time to see the likely end of the sellout streak on Wednesday night.

Make sense? You're much better equipped for the ride to come than most of us. For all the changes we've seen, the changes in regional mood as tied to the Sox won't be stopping anytime soon.

It is that rarest of years in New England, one genuinely without expectations. Among the rational majority, anywhere from a 75- to a 95-win season should be greeted with much the same reaction: "Yeah, I can see that."

How many bounceback years can one team expect? Can the injury prone among them hold up? Will anyone else emerge from a muddled AL East pack? Will the offense be there?

With two wild cards, it's a playoff structure designed to keep hope alive into September. And hope, it doesn't seem, will be in short supply. The issue in recent years was never talent. Pedroia, Middlebrooks, Ellsbury, Jon Lester, Clay Buchholz "» it was about it coalescing.

The little things form that glue, form that likability Bobby and the Bombthrowers lacked entirely a year ago. Error-free baseball. (Through seven games, check.) Aggressiveness on the basepaths. (A work in progress; no team entering Monday had run into even half as many outs at the plate.) Genuine camaraderie. (Think Koji Uehara racing through high-five lines in the dugout or Victorino greeting Middlebrooks, after he fell just shy of four homers on Sunday, with a loving "you [stink].")

Despite all the smoke blown about getting angry and staying away, we want to believe. And a 5-2 start after back-to-back 5-10s equals belief, especially when Lester and Monday's star Buchholz are a combined 4-0 with a 1.04 ERA.

"I didn't have one thing, one pitch that was working all the way through," said Buchholz, who capped seven shutout innings with an eighth strikeout on his 113th pitch. "It was a bit of a grind."

A grind, he admitted, that's a little easier to stomach in a happy room.

"It's easier to come to the ballpark, in my opinion," he added, "when the team is winning and everyone is in high spirits, in good spirits, and has the same goal."

The lessons come in with the struggles, though. Chemistry's easy when you win. And the lows seem lower here, with all of us too ready to feed a media machine that demands judgments each and every day.

Monday began a run of 17 home games in 21 days, offering ample opportunity to wait out the discount beer lines and see just what this group can be.

Stephen Drew is coming. David Ortiz could be too. When will Lackey be back?

Sure, some things were different at Fenway Park on Monday. But baseball's great truism remains.

Winning fixes everything.

Jon Couture covers the Red Sox for The Standard-Times. Contact him at jon.couture@bostonherald.com, or through 'Better Red Than Dead' at Blogs.SouthCoastToday.com/red-sox